An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

They know enough who know how to learn.

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

That’s the hope, isn’t it? To see your family in your time of dying.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.

God does not love us because we are hard or easy to love, He loves us because He is God.

It's true that I am not from the south and I have a certain reserve. I take time to get close to, and I don't immediately throw my arms round someone. But it is more a question of style.

Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

Perhaps the things that break our hearts are the very things that serve to open them.

It was amazing. You don't have a choice but to play your best. They force you do do that because they're smart and that's the fun part for me, I'm being challenged to think faster and be creative.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.